The company, which gets about 200 orders a day in Bengaluru, plans to use the funds for marketing activities aimed at customer acquisition.BENGALURU: Town Essentials, a Bengaluru based full-service grocer that supplies to both institutions and consumers, has raised $1 million (about Rs 6.7 crore) in a fresh round of angel funding from a clutch of high-net-worth individuals. With this fundraising, the total amount put in by angel investors in the company till date has risen to Rs 12 crore.

The participants in this round included Infosys’ first non-founder employee Sharad Hegde as the lead investor; former Workday executive Girish Reddy; Siddharth Patil, head of data science at the TellApart division at Twitter; and existing investor Shrikant Patil. The investors will be part of the company’s governing council.

The company, which gets about 200 orders a day in Bengaluru, plans to use the funds for marketing activities aimed at customer acquisition. “We will make our basket of private label stronger by adding new products, improve back-end manufacturing and spend on advertising,” said Amar Murthy, founder and CEO of Town Essentials, which has a staff strength of 120 at present.

The company has launched a new platform called Morning Drop that will focus on products such as milk, bread, eggs that are subscription in nature. Alongside, it plans to ramp up customer base to about 10,000 and launch a mobile app for customers to order from.

“Most startups fail because founders don’t have the personality to weather the ups and downs. Town Essential’s founders understand Indian consumers well and what they want. They have a lot of grit. Also, I’m most excited about Morning Drop as it is a unique and innovative solution tailored to Indian society,” said Siddharth Patil.

Town Essentials has about 3,000 retail customers, 300 institutional customers and sells from an inventory of 1,500 stock-keeping units. It has a line of 200 products in its private label line that includes sweets, snack foods, powders, pickles, etc. With about Rs 1,100 per order, the company clocked sales of Rs 24 crore in 2014-15 and is profitable at an EBITDA level, Murthy said.

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